Decide between vBulletin or Drupal or Joomla?
 

Hi*


A new (rather big) potential client wants their current site to be rebuild. They are now using an old (their current webmaster doesn't have the time anymore) Drupal-based website* which includes the following:

• CMS with articles which are posted by their staff*
• A shopping cart*
• Downloadable .pdf newsletters*
• A directory of names and adresses.

That's about it.


What they want for the future is:

• All of the above*
• Forums* blogs* albums* extended userprofiles* paid online memberships* paid online content* paid downloads.

Since I have been using vBulletin for 8 years now* I am rather familiar what vBulletin can and can not do. In my opinion -and seeing it from a business point of view- vBulletin is 5 years behind. Really* the promised CMS should have been released 5 years ago* when the demand was huge.

Now open source projects like Drupal and Joomla have seen the light and filled the big gap on a lot of levels. And you don't even have to invest money in it... so* the above mentioned client is now investigating if* Drupal or Joomla can provide what they need. They even looked at Ning* but that is now out of the question.

So* what's left is Drupal* Joomla or vBulletin.

Let's look at their needs:

• CMS
  Does vBulletin offer a CMS? After waiting 7 years (still very hard to understand this from a business point of view) for it* it will finally see the light in the coming months. So hopefully it supports usergroups permissions* so we can set that only staff members can post articles and add menus*
• Shopping cart
  There is no official or third party professional shopping cart available for vBulletin to my knowledge. Drupal and Joomla do have this available. So it becomes much more easier for this client to monetize it's site when he uses Drupal or Joomla instead of vBulletin*
• Directory
  No directory application available* but there are some offerings on vBulletin.org (a site which I resists)
• Forums* blogs* albums* extended userprofiles
  More or less available in vB 3.8* although badly integrated in the overall product. vB 4.0 promises to fix this (finally). All of this is available in Drupal/Joomla aswell. The only drawback is* they haven't such a good forum as vBulletin offers*
• Paid online memberships* paid online content* paid downloads
  Also things like these are -apparently- much easier to achieve in Drupal/Joomla (with extensions). The key factor for this client in choosing his platform is: monetization. They want their shopping cart so people can pay online for books and cd's and stuff; it needs to handle everything automatically. They also want to offer paid .pdf's and they want to offer paid downloadable podcasts... all as easy and automatic as possible.

I have no clue whatsoever what the CMS of IB/Jelsoft will be offering in the coming years (where is the roadmap?!!!)* but I would appreciated some insight of people 'in the know' on what platform this client should be choosing right now. They need to make their decision at the end of this year/Q1 2010.